Another useful, er, use for cat /dev/null -- I'm copying files verbosely to my external hard drive. I've noticed a directory that had several versions of the same video: mpg, avi, flv, and dv -- the latter with 9 GB :P I didn't need that one, so _while_it was copying the .dv I wentcat /dev/null > /path/unnecessary-long-file.dvThanks for the tip!and hey presto -- the backup moved on to the next file, and I didn't break the cp command (which would be very hard to resume) (yes, I hear that rsync is a better way of doing this, I'll check it for next time)